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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Myths & mythology
Sexy Like Us: Disability, Humor, and Sexuality takes a humorous,
intimate approach to disability through the stories, jokes,
performances, and other creative expressions of people with
disabilities. Author Teresa Milbrodt explores why individuals can
laugh at their leglessness, find stoma bags sexual, discover
intimacy in scars, and flaunt their fragility in ways both
hilarious and serious. Their creative and comic acts crash,
collide, and collaborate with perceptions of disability in
literature and dominant culture, allowing people with disabilities
to shape political disability identity and disability pride, call
attention to social inequalities, and poke back at ableist cultural
norms. This book also discusses how the ambivalent nature of comedy
has led to debates within disability communities about when it is
acceptable to joke, who has permission to joke, and which jokes
should be used inside and outside a community's inner circle.
Joking may be difficult when considering aspects of disability that
involve physical or emotional pain and struggles to adapt to new
forms of embodiment. At the same time, people with disabilities can
use humor to expand the definitions of disability and sexuality.
They can help others with disabilities assert themselves as sexy
and sexual. And they can question social norms and stigmas around
bodies in ways that open up journeys of being, not just for
individuals who consider themselves disabled, but for all people.
The Celtic peoples fed on a rich mixture of legend and myth which,
in many versions and derivations, were told at the firesides of
Europe since before literacy. The Celts' ancestors had come from
the foothills of the Himalayas, through the Middle East into
Europe, and consequently many of the mythologies of the world
connect with Celtic motifs. The most powerfully intact of the
Celtic myths and legends are to be found in the Irish, Welsh and
Breton tradition. Frank Delaney has been reading the Celtic legends
since childhood and in this volume draws together their main
strands, in a retelling of many of the most important mythologies.
This book brings up-to-date the story-telling powers of the Celts.
A Feminist Mythology takes us on a poetic journey through the
canonical myths of femininity, testing them from the point of view
of our modern condition. A myth is not an object, but rather a
process, one that Chiara Bottici practises by exploring different
variants of the myth of "womanhood" through first- and third-person
prose and poetry. We follow a series of myths that morph into each
other, disclosing ways of being woman that question inherited
patriarchal orders. In this metamorphic world, story-telling is not
just a mix of narrative, philosophical dialogues and metaphysical
theorizing: it is a current that traverses all of them by
overflowing the boundaries it encounters. In doing so, A Feminist
Mythology proposes an alternative writing style that recovers
ancient philosophical and literary traditions from the pre-Socratic
philosophers and Ovid's Metamorphoses to the philosophical novellas
and feminist experimental writings of the last century.
Naomi "Omie" Wise was drowned by her lover in the waters of North
Carolina's Deep River in 1807, and her murder has been remembered
in ballad and story for well over two centuries. Mistakes,
romanticization and misremembering have been injected into Naomi's
biography over time, blurring the line between reality and fiction.
The authors of this book, whose family has lived in the Deep River
area since the 18th century, are descendants of many of the people
who knew Naomi Wise or were involved in her murder investigation.
This is the story of a young woman betrayed and how her death gave
way to the folk traditions by which she is remembered today. The
book sheds light on the plight of impoverished women in early
America and details the fascinating inner workings of the Piedmont
North Carolina Quaker community that cared for Naomi in her final
years and kept her memory alive.
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